Race 15 - Day 3
Crew Diary - Storms
30 July
On the afternoon of 26th July, Scott and I were chatting when I was the grinder with our Code 1 flying gracefully and proudly in the cold air against quite thick grey grey clouds above our heads and in the horizon. Our topics began with ‘What do you do?’ to our boats, to Jazz, to our favourite 007s who could not die and never dies… Suddenly he told me I needed to write the blog, maybe concerning, as I did not know what to write. Scott said many crew wrote about sunrises & sunsets, animals & birds. Of course, they should, these things are among the most beautiful and lovable ones to us human beings, we have been writing about them with passion for thousands of years and there is still a lot to say. However, I truly would like to say something about another storm we met during the first two days after we left Derry~Londonderry – yes another one, as I met a very strong tropical storm during Leg1 nearly three years ago.
Before 10pm on 24 July, our watch got on board after two hours of rest, a dreamy & fairy tale world appeared in front of my eyes. Eleven colourful Clipper Race boats were here and there, floating on the smooth, a little bit shining navy blue silky sea surface. You still could see clearly several patches of Chinese blue sky just like holes in the far end horizon while the rest of the sky was already occupied by white & dark grey clouds, and you knew the darkness was on his way. There was almost no wind, no breeze, all you could hear was the sound of silence.
Did this and did that, we fought our way out and went north finally. The darkness was getting thicker and thicker, gradually it was the only thing left to see surrounding you. You could only feel three things, one was the wind which was brushing your face, becoming stronger and stronger whistling by, another one was the boat flying forwards at the same time jumping up and down strongly, the third one was the warmth and heat of your body leaving you so quickly that you just could not helping shivering.
Our boat went forward with Yankee 1 for nearly two hours until our skipper Mike came to us for a briefing about reefing, telling us the wind was nearly around 30-35 knots. Oh, God, already?! Our watch gave Mike a perfect answer of what we would do for the reefing. I hardly could see his face in the darkness, only his low and calm opera voice could come through the endless darkness to reach my ears. The white-head-waves were showing and vanishing. I guess he knew clearly we could do a good one in the darkness. Then our watch changed Yankee 1 into Yankee 2 and did a nice reefing in a quick and smooth way. We were ready for more storm to come.
Yes, more storm was waiting for us on the morning of the second day on our watch from 6:00am to 12:00pm, the freezing cold and wet storm whose coldness I did not expect to happen during so called summer time at all and have had no similar experiences before, it was completely beyond my understanding. Shiyi and I were sitting and standing in the cockpit? The less than 10 metres huge waves reminded me of the tropical storms I had during Leg1 but, but then it was warm… while this storm, even with the heavy clothes on me, I felt extreme freezing coldness which made me feel I almost had nothing on. The waves jumped onto the deck and ran like rivers, our jackets were completely wet and it was raining inside the jackets. I was totally, totally wet inside out. The watch time was 6 hours, I had been shivering like crazy for nearly 5 hours and 45 minutes. After I got down below, I still could not stop shivering for another hour even if I tried so, so hard to stop it. Interesting thing is, the coldness did not give me a running nose or hot forehead, but it just succeeded in keeping me away from any food for 4 days except apples, oranges and only one meal of Shiyi’s wonderful noodle soup. I have a brand new precious experience of a perfect freezing cold storm, hahaha...
Best wishes from all the crew aboard Visit Sanya, China.